Now Executive Director of the China Media Project, leading the project’s research and partnerships, David originally joined the project in Hong Kong in 2004. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village (Penguin), a book of reportage about urbanization and social activism in China, and co-editor of Investigative Journalism in China (HKU Press).
The following post by Fang Jiaping (方家平), a well-known Chinese columnist, was deleted from Sina Weibo on October 8, 2012. The post is a simple remark about remembering Yuan Mu (袁木), the former State Council press spokesman who held the press conference on June 6, 1989, just two days after a brutal crackdown on student demonstrators [watch video HERE]. Yuan has since defended the Party’s actions on June 4, 1989, saying history has shown them to be correct. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
Former head of the research office of the State Council, Yuan Mu — already there are few left who remember him!
The post is accompanied by a picture of Yuan Mu:
Fang Jiaping’s original Chinese post reads:
前国务院研究室主任袁木——知道他的人已经不多了
NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.
By QIAN GANG
Keyword: socialism with Chinese characteristics (中国特色社会主)
In China, there is a popular phrase people use when referring to the seemingly whimsical world of the political slogan: “It’s an open basket,” they’ll say of this or that watchword, “Anything can be thrown in there.” This could be said of just about all the specialized vocabularies I have covered in this series. And it is certainly true of one of the most central phrases now in use by the Chinese Communist Party — “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi.
As we prepare for the 18th National Congress, this term in fact is celebrating its 30th birthday, and it is running as strong as ever. There is little doubt this watchword will appear, probably prominently, in the next political report. The real question is exactly what Chinese leaders will use to fill this basket.
The patent rights, so to speak, on socialism with Chinese characteristics go back to Deng Xiaoping. Deng first used the term in his opening remarks to the 12th National Congress in 1982, which were printed in the People’s Daily. For Deng, this was a reform slogan, and the obvious target of his reform was the Mao-style socialism that had been practiced to great detriment in China for 30 years.
By the time the congress rolled around in 1982, the Party had already dissolved the people’s commune system in China’s countryside, and market reforms had begun. In fact, Deng’s true intention was to practice not socialism with Chinese characteristics, but capitalism with Chinese characteristics. But the changes he initiated were already drawing opposition from conservatives in the Party ranks. Deng had to proceed cautiously. He could not force a break with the political orthodoxy without losing important allies needed to push reforms.
Deng’s introduction of the term “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was a stratagem, what my Western readers might call a Trojan horse. Better yet, to return to the popular Chinese phrase, it was a basket. On the outside, it seemed ideologically acceptable to conservatives, but inside it could accommodate Deng’s vision of change. The crux of the term is not “socialism” but “Chinese characteristics.” The modifier “Chinese characteristics” enabled Deng to qualify and adapt socialism, easing it in a new direction. This was Deng’s great magic trick, you might say — making people believe socialism was still there even though it had disappeared right before their eyes.
In 1982, socialism with Chinese characteristics was a newborn watchword. It had not yet appeared in General Secretary Hu Yaobang’s political report to the 12th National Congress, held in September that year. The term rose to prominence only after Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang laid out their blueprint for further reform.
The following are the full titles of the political reports delivered to national congresses in China, from the 12th in 1982 to the 17th in 2007. For anyone unaccustomed to the Party’s windbag ways, these will no doubt seem a marvel of expansiveness: 12th: “Fully Creating a New Phase in the Socialist Construction of Modernization” (Hu Yaobang) 13th: “Moving Forward Along the Path of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” (Zhao Ziyang) 14th: “Accelerating the Pace of Reform and Opening and the Construction of Modernization, Striving for Greater Victories in the Enterprise of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” (Jiang Zemin) 15th: “Holding High the Glorious Banner of Deng Xiaoping Theory, Pushing the Building of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics into the 21st Century” (Jiang Zemin) 16th: “Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in all Respects, Opening a New Phase of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” (Jiang Zemin) 17th: “Holding High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, Struggling for New Victories in the All-Round Building of a Moderately Prosperous Society” (Hu Jintao)
[ABOVE: In 1987, the front page of the People’s Daily reads: “Moving Forward Along the Path of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”]
My point here is that every single political report since the 13th National Congress in 1987 has included socialism with Chinese characteristics in the title. This, indeed, is the 400-pound gorilla of Party watchwords. Both the reports to the 13th and 14th congresses referred to socialism with Chinese characteristics as a “banner.” The report to the 15th National Congress, held in 1997, the year of Deng Xiaoping’s death, mentions the “Glorious Banner of Deng Xiaoping Theory,” which essentially has the same meaning as the previous two references to socialism with Chinese characteristics. From the 15th National Congress to the 17th National Congress, the reference to the “Glorious Banner of Deng Xiaoping Theory” was prevalent and socialism with Chinese characteristics faded somewhat. In Hu Jintao’s report to the 17th National Congress in 2007, however, the reference to socialism with Chinese characteristics as a “banner” returned, marking a general resurgence of the term.
So, what exactly is socialism with Chinese characteristics? Can anyone really say?
Every political report since the 13th National Congress in 1987 has been accompanied by an elaborate treatment. These explanatory notes serve as a kind of political bible for ordinary Chinese — a tuning fork that gets everyone on the same note. If we look carefully at these treatments, we can spot how watchwords shift in meaning.
The 13th National Congress was marked by a fierce struggle between the reform faction and the leftist conservatives. At that time the explanation of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which was called the “basic line,” was explained like this: “[The term means] leading and uniting people of all ethnic groups, with economic construction as the core, adhering to the Four Basic Principles, adhering to reform and opening, with self-reliance, [with a] tough and pioneering [spirit], struggling to transform our country into a strong and prosperous, democratic and civilized modern socialist nation.” Within this explanation, “reform and opening” and the Four Basic Principles are afforded equal position. In the context of the 1980s this actually gave reform and opening the upper hand.
The 14th National Congress was held three years after the June Fourth Incident at Tiananmen Square that marked the violent end to pro-democracy protests in 1989. Even as he faced off with a resurgent left — which was making political hay of the unrest in 1989 — Deng was adamant that not a single word of the 1987 political report be altered. In the spring of 1992, before the congress was held, Deng broke the stalemate by making his “southern tour,” a whistle-stop tour of economically important cities in the south during which he promoted an acceleration of reforms.
In his political report later that year, Jiang Zemin stressed that while the Party’s leaders had to be mindful of a rightward shift they had to remain especially vigilant against threats from the left. Deng’s southern tour had succeeded in tipping the scales in favor of reform.
By the 15th National Congress in 1997 the market economy was already well established and China was preparing for entry into the World Trade Organization. Once again, Jiang Zemin warned the Party to stay the course and not shift to the left. He said the country and the Party needed to be “even clearer about what is meant by the primary stage of socialism, [and by] a socialist economy, politics and culture with Chinese characteristics.”
Jiang was once again transforming socialism with Chinese characteristics, filling the basket with several changes to ownership systems in China. Now the term also implied the creation of a basic economic system in which various new forms of ownership could operate. In practice, this was already a far cry from the call to stick to the “socialist path,” an integral part of the Four Basic Principles (another watchword I addressed here).
Five years later, Jiang Zemin no longer cautioned leaders to be alert to a leftward shift. In his political report to the 16th National Congress, he summarized the Party’s achievements in the “construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” breaking them down into 10 points. These included Mao Zedong Thought and the Four Basic Principles (both much beloved by those on the left). Most crucial, however, was Jiang’s closing statement. Wrapping up his 10 points, he said the Party must “represent the developmental needs of China’s advanced production capacity, represent the forward direction of China’s advanced culture, and represent the fundamental interests of the majority of the people.”
This, of course, was the so-called Three Represents, Jiang’s banner term, or qihao — an issue I dealt with in my last piece. Jiang Zemin was now stuffing the basket of socialism with Chinese characteristics with his own political term, a symbol of his legacy.
Not surprisingly, Hu Jintao’s political report to the 17th National Congress in 2007 made further revisions to socialism with Chinese characteristics. Hu’s words were (and I’ll have to plead with readers to bear with me):
. . . The road of socialism with Chinese characteristics is about building a socialist market economy, socialist politics, a socialist advanced civilization and a socialist harmonious society, building a modern socialist nation that is prosperous, democratic and civilized, [all] under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, rooted in the basic circumstances of the country, with economic construction as the core, adhering to the Four Basic Principles, adhering to reform and opening, liberating and developing the productive forces of society, consolidating and improving the socialist system. . . The theoretical system of socialism with Chinese characteristics is a scientific theoretical system that includes Deng Xiaoping Theory, the important ideologies of the Three Represents and the Scientific View of Development and other important strategic ideas.
And there you have it, not a lucid definition of socialism with Chinese characteristics, but a perplexing mixed bag of Party watchwords. The phrase “other important strategic ideas” reminds us that this is a collection of evolving ideologies. You could see it as the accumulating sum of China’s political baggage.
Hu Jintao essentially repeated this definition, such as it is, in his speech to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2011. In a speech on July 23, 2012, Hu added that “socialism with Chinese characteristics is a banner for China’s present-day development and progress, and a banner of unity and struggle for the whole Party and all the peoples of the nation.” This was tantamount to saying that the term will also, in the future, remain a banner standing for all three of the latest leadership generations — Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
[ABOVE: The July 24, 2012, edition of the People’s Daily touts socialism with Chinese characteristics as a basket of banner terms.]
The front page of the July 24, 2012, edition of the People’s Daily, shown above, offers a hint about the upcoming 18th National Congress. In the upper right-hand corner of the page, the three banner terms of Deng, Jiang and Hu are listed out. The main headline, meanwhile, emphasizes socialism with Chinese characteristics. From this we could hypothesize that no entirely new watchwords will be unveiled at the congress. Rather, socialism with Chinese characteristics will be contested among various political interests and factions, emerging once again as the greatest common denominator.
What we will need to watch is how socialism with Chinese characteristics is explained. How will it be different? Will it continue to bear the ideas of Jiang Zemin, or the Four Basic Principles, or Mao Zedong Thought? Inside the evolving basket of socialism with Chinese characteristics, will Hu Jintao’s Scientific View of Development have a new and special place? Will the Scientific View of Development become, like the banner terms of Deng and Jiang, an idea merely offering “guidance,” or will it be once again defined (as it has been more recently) as a fundamental policy to be loudly proclaimed, and followed reverentially, by China’s next leader?
By QIAN GANG
Keyword: Scientific View of Development
On July 11, 2012, the South China Morning Post ran a report about how training materials for police in Hong Kong were found to contain Communist Party political slogans. One of the watchwords apparently included in the materials was the “Three Represents,” or sange daibiao, the political concept associated with China’s former president, Jiang Zemin. News of the training materials spread rapidly on the Internet, and many Hong Kong locals were dismayed to learn that police in the territory were being subjected to “brainwashing.”
Lately, nerves in Hong Kong have been especially sensitive to perceived encroachments from Beijing. And concern about the Party’s political slogans seeping over the border may be understandable. But the fact is that officials in China today would scratch their heads if you asked them to list out the “Three Represents.” Assuming the police training materials in Hong Kong were really intended to “brainwash,” I don’t envy the author’s daunting task of explaining what the “Three Represents” are all about.
This phrase, in fact, leads us into the mysterious core of what I have called the Party’s “general lexicon,” the idea of the ideological banner, or qihao (pronounced “CHEE-how”).
Protests signs are posted on a wall at the site of September 2012 protests in Hong Kong against plans to roll out a “national education” program many see as “brainwashing” being pushed by Beijing. Photo posted with permission from Human Rights in China.
All four generations of Chinese Communist Party leaders have had their own ideological banners. These symbolize a leader’s contributions, which could be called their political philosophies, except that qihao are often far less material or definable than that suggests. Qihao are political brands, and like commercial brands they have an insubstantial quality that transcends their material (or practical) value.
Mao Zedong’s ideological banner is “Mao Zedong Thought” (Mao Zedong Sixiang). Deng Xiaoping‘s is “Deng Xiaoping Theory” (Deng Xiaoping Lilun). Jiang Zemin’s, once again, is the “Three Represents.” And Hu Jintao‘s banner, his brand legacy, is the “Scientific View of Development” (Kexue Fazhan Guan). Below are China’s four generations of top leaders and their respective qihao.
These ideological banners may seem inconsequential, flapping about in China’s political winds. But Party leaders regard them with great seriousness, and their symbolic importance is reiterated in every major document or speech:
. . . raising high the glorious banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, guided by the important ideologies of Deng Xiaoping Theory and the ‘Three Represents’, [the Party] thoroughly implements the Scientific View of Development . . .
The above phrase is perhaps the most standard expression of political correctness in contemporary China. It brings in (as it must) all three of the prevailing ideological banners of the Chinese Communist Party.
To a large extent, understanding the 18th National Congress begins with an understanding of these qihao. What do they mean? How do they emerge?
Mao Zedong Thought is a qihao that the Maoist left of China’s political spectrum regards as its quintessence. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party engaged in a limited criticism of the errors committed under Mao. Mao Zedong’s ideas themselves were not repudiated, however. In fact, the Marxism-Leninism so central to Mao Zedong Thought remained ideologically intact and symbolically important.
In the 1980s, no new qihao were created within the Chinese Communist Party. It was only in the 1990s that Deng Xiaoping Theory strutted onto the stage. This new banner term reached its apogee in the political report to the 15th National Congress in 1997, following Deng Xiaoping’s death earlier that year. Deng Xiaoping Theory was essentially a revision of Mao Zedong Thought, upholding the intense concentration of power that marked Mao’s rule while at the same time promoting a capitalist economy. Most ordinary Chinese today see the policy of “reform and opening up,” or gaige kaifang, as emblematic of Deng and his ideas.
One of many books available in China attempting to explain “Deng Xiaoping Theory” and its significance.
At the 16th National Congress, five years after Deng Xiaoping’s death, it was Jiang Zemin’s turn to shine. Even as he transferred power to Hu Jintao, Jiang’s own qihao, the Three Represents, climbed to its zenith.
The Three Represents demanded that the Chinese Communist Party “represent the developmental needs of China’s advanced production capacity, represent the forward direction of China’s advanced culture, and represent the fundamental interests of the majority of the people.” That is a mouthful. So it’s no surprise that many people seized on the much simpler idea — Jiang’s basic intent in all this sloganeering — of “letting capitalists join the Party.” A few commentators tried using the term “Jiang Zemin Doctrine” to describe his ideological legacy, but this never caught on. Jiang’s doctrine would not bear his name, a reflection of the fading notion in China of the paramount leader.
Once Hu Jintao had fully secured the reins as China’s national leader, becoming chairman of the Central Military Commission in 2004, he set about creating his own political brand. Known as the Scientific View of Development, Hu’s qihao rose to the top in the political report to the 17th National Congress in 2007. The Scientific View of Development was about sustainable, balanced and people-based development in China. This was understood essentially as a recognition that China’s growth through the 1990s had to a great extent been uneven, worsening tensions and divisions in Chinese society.
Like Jiang’s third-generation term, Hu’s fourth-generation qihao did not bear his name. But Hu’s authority as a Party commander was in fact a notch below that of his predecessor. In the Jiang era, major policy announcements typically began with the phrase, “The Central Committee united around the core of comrade Jiang Zemin . . . ” Hu Jintao has had to settle for a rather less potent preamble: “The Central Committee with Comrade Hu Jintao as General Secretary . . . ”
To sum up, when Jiang Zemin came to office in 1989, he solidified his power and standing first by raising up Deng Xiaoping’s banner, Deng Xiaoping Theory. Only after some time did he introduce his own banner term, which was passed on to his successor, Hu Jintao. More than a year after he came to power, Hu Jintao fashioned his own banner, the Scientific View of Development. But the following graphs illuminate one important difference in the life cycle of Hu’s term.
The first graph shows the four qihao as they have appeared in the People’s Daily since the late 1990s. The second graph shows the relative strength of these terms in the five official speeches given at the 60th, 70th, 80th, 85th and 90th anniversaries of the Chinese Communist Party. What we can see clearly here is that Hu Jintao’s term has gone into decline even while he is in office.
Uses of the Scientific View of Development in the People’s Daily fell steadily through 2010 and 2011. And when we compare the official speech given at the Party’s 85th anniversary in 2006 to the 2011 speech to commemorate the 90th anniversary, we again see use of Hu Jintao’s term slipping. Deng Xiaoping Theory and the Three Represents also fell during this period, but Mao Zedong Thought rose slightly. Reading Hu Jintao’s speech for the 90th anniversary, I speculated in the Hong Kong Economic Journal at the time that the weakness of Hu’s Scientific View of Development probably meant there was little hope that his qihao would figure prominently in the political report to the 18th National Congress in 2012.
During the first half of 2012, there were 571 articles in the People’s Daily that used the Scientific View of Development, down substantially from the same period in 2011. But as the 18th National Congress drew closer this year, Hu seemed more intent on raising the pitch of his legacy term.
On July 23, 2012, Hu Jintao delivered a speech at a special forum attended by provincial-level leaders. In this speech, the relative frequencies of the four Party-banner terms were different from what we saw in his 90th anniversary speech. Mao Zedong Thought was mentioned just once, while Deng Xiaoping Theory and the Three Represents were each given three mentions. The surprise was Hu’s Scientific View of Development, which came in with six mentions (plus three additional mentions of the shortened term “scientific development”).
In his speech, Hu Jintao resoundingly affirmed China’s accomplishments in the decade since the 16th National Congress, saying it had made “historical achievements and progress” chiefly because of the “formation and implementation of the Scientific View of Development” under the guiding ideas of Mao, Deng and Jiang.
Hu Jintao’s exact words were:
The full and serious fulfillment of the Scientific View of Development remains a long-term, difficult task, and it faces a range of tensions and hardships that will be very challenging. We must, with greater resolve, more effective measures and an improved system, fully implement the Scientific View of Development. [We must] truly transform the Scientific View of Development into a powerful force driving the better and more rapid development of our economy and society.
In the wake of Hu’s speech, the People’s Daily ran a series of articles explicating it — explaining its “spirit,” as this is called in Party jargon. On July 31, 2012, an article called “Deeply Grasping the Major Importance of the Scientific View of Development” offered a detailed review of Hu Jintao’s qihao. One week later, on August 6, People’s Daily Online ran an article by Liu Yunshan, the Party’s propaganda chief. The article said China must “more conscientiously take the road of the Scientific View of Development.” This wave of pro-Hu propaganda suggested that the Scientific View of Development was not just a “guiding principle,” or zhidao sixiang, but in fact was a fundamental policy to be put into full effect for the foreseeable future, even in the face of “hardship.” The context — and let’s not forget how sensitive the Party is to context — implied that the Scientific View of Development is a policy that will define how China handles its business for the next 10 years.
The Scientific View of Development symbolizes Hu Jintao’s political power. Affirming this term means affirming Hu’s 10 years of leadership; strongly emphasizing it signals his lingering influence. For this reason, we can look at how the Scientific View of Development appears at the 18th National Congress as an important indicator.
The Chinese Communist Party has held four national congresses since the June 4, 1989, crackdown on democracy demonstrations in Beijing. When we plot the number of times the four qihao are used in the political reports to those congresses, this is what we come up with:
We can look at the fate of Jiang Zemin’s banner term for clues to what is in store for Hu Jintao’s Scientific View of Development. Jiang presented the Three Represents late in his term as president, and he passed the term on to Hu Jintao. During Hu’s first two years in office, the Three Represents remained influential. In 2004, Jiang’s qihao was written into the Party Constitution (think of it as the Party’s watchword hall of fame), just as Deng Xiaoping Theory had been written into the Party Constitution in 1999. On September 19, 2004, just as Jiang Zemin was handing his chairmanship of the powerful Central Military Commission over to Hu Jintao, a meeting of the Central Committee issued a “Decision” on strengthening the Party’s “governing capacity.” That decision formally introduced the Scientific View of Development. From that time on, Jiang Zemin’s qihao faded while Hu Jintao’s burgeoned.
There is an old saying in China: “When people leave, the tea grows cold.” This really is the case for the ideological banner terms that symbolize the legacies of China’s Party leaders. Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents and the Scientific View of Development — these are all cups of tea sitting on the conference table of Chinese politics.
When the curtain opens on the 18th National Congress, where will these banner terms stand? Will Hu Jintao be able to do as Jiang Zemin did, passing his qihao on to the next generation of leaders? If so, how far will his successors carry the banner before it falls? When will his successor, whoever it may be, introduce their own political brand (their own cup of tea) to the world? And what kind of qihao will that be?
The following post by Chinese poet Xu Xin (徐昕) was deleted from Sina Weibo on September 21, 2012. The post, a response to calls for the boycotting of Japanese goods in the midst of the China-Japan row over sovereignty of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, is a poster calling for people to focus instead on the special privileges enjoyed by China’s government leaders. Xu Xin currently has more than 152,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
“Smashing special provisions [for Party leaders] is better than boycotting Japanese goods!”
A series of news reports in 2011 revealed how China’s leaders enjoyed special supplies of organic vegetables and other foods even as the country was racked by continuous food safety scandals impacting ordinary Chinese.
The poster’s slogan in Chinese reads:
抵制日货不如砸烂特供
“Those who eat special supplies are the true traitors and knaves in this country! The harm they do is greater than that of invaders!” one user responded to Xu Xin’s post.
NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.
By QIAN GANG
Keyword: social construction (社会建设) Related Term: civil society (公民社会)
So far in this series, I have dealt with political reform issues and watchwords that are predominately about the reform (or not) of China’s political institutions. How do China’s leaders propose to deal with the problem of over-concentration of power? How will the incoming generation of leaders conceptualize power and its relationship to the Party and to Chinese society? Yet another oft-overlooked issue integral to political reform is the role of society in China.
In recent years, the relationship of the government to society has become a topic regularly discussed in China. Academics, journalists and others routinely describe China as a place where “government is strong and society is weak,” or qiang zhengfu ruo shehui (强政府、弱社会).
In one recent example, Chinese historian Xiao Gongqin wrote in the magazine China Entrepreneur:
Under the ‘strong government ‒ weak society’ system, the collusion of power and money drives inequality in society and it’s hard for [this nexus of power and money] to be subjected to effective oversight by autonomous social forces . . .
So where does Chinese society and its development fit into the overall picture of political change in China?
Volunteers donate blood in Guangxi province following the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province. Photo from Bxzzk.cn.
Ever since the 17th National Congress in 2007, the terms “social construction” (shehui jianshe), “social management” (shehui guanli) and “social system reforms” (shehui tizhi gaige) have been heating up as political watchwords.
Before the 17th National Congress, I wrote an essay called “Keep Your Eyes on Hu Jintao’s ‘Social System Reforms,'” in which I shared the views of Chen Ziming, a leading Chinese economist and political thinker who was jailed through the 1990s for his role in the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Chen said that reform in China was an opera in three acts, moving the country from economic reform to social reform and eventually to political reform. He argued that the chief task of the present generation of leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, was to move the country toward an “opening of society.” The task of pushing political reform, or “opening up politics,” would fall to their successors.
This prompted me to pose the question:
. . . In observing President Hu Jintao, then, is it possible that our focus should be on how far social system reforms can progress, and not on how substantial his steps on political reform are?
Hu Jintao raised the issue of “social construction” not long after he took office. In his 2004 “Decision” on strengthening the leadership capacity of the Chinese Communist Party — I’ll spare readers the full title of that policy document — he said the Party needed to “strengthen social construction and management.” According to the document, this included “bringing into play the capacity of autonomous grassroots social organizations to coordinate interests, resolve conflicts and mitigate hardship.” Grassroots social organizations could be used, it said, to provide services and relay the demands of various social groups, “joining the forces of social management and social service.”
In China, social system reform is often regarded as a kind of subset of political reform. Its goal is the building of a civil society. But along the color spectrum of Chinese politics, “civil society” is in fact what I call a light blue term, used by market-driven media and academics (even some within the Party establishment) but never by senior leaders.
On the eve of the 17th National Congress in 2007, Yu Keping, a theorist some observers believe is closely aligned with Hu Jintao, wrote in the official Beijing Daily: “Since the 16th National Congress the Party and the government have paid more attention to the role of various kinds of social organizations, including civic organizations, industry associations and community organizations. They have begun to emphasize [the need for] reform and improvement of the social management system. This means the Party and government have in fact already begun to see the existence and role of civil society as an important basis for decision making.”
The cover of Making Democracy Benefit China, a book of discussions with political theorist Yu Keping.
The political report to the 17th National Congress did not use the term “civil society.” Ahead of the congress, I believed it might actually appear in the report, but the five years since have indicated there is little hope of that.
After the 17th National Congress, there were a number of developments on the “social construction” front in China’s southern Guangdong province. In the fall of 2010, Shenzhen was Premier Wen Jiabao’s first stop in what would later be known as his “seven mentions of political reform” ‒ seven separate speeches in which he urged political reform as an imperative. Not long after Wen’s run of political reform speeches, Shenzhen held a series of events to commemorate its 30th anniversary as a Special Economic Zone, and President Hu Jintao traveled to the city to attend.
Responding to a general interest in Shenzhen as a beacon of reforms — economic reforms were jump-started there in the 1980s — the city’s top leader, Wang Rong, suggested openly that new reforms were in the offing. “Shenzhen is an immigrant city of economic vitality,” he began, referring to the sea of migrant labor the city had attracted from the countryside and from other cities. “We hope that in this new kind of society that we can be the earliest in building a civil society,” he said, adding that “if no new efforts were made, the special zone would not exist.”
Wang’s implication was that even though Shenzhen was no longer special in the sense that the economic reforms piloted there in the 1980s were now happening all over China, it should remain special by staying at the forefront of the reform effort. In what seemed an even more significant piece of information, Wang Rong said that “the greatest advantage rendered by the central Party leadership is permission to experiment,” a remark seeming to suggest that the city had received the blessing of senior Party leaders in its plans to push civil society development.
A headline at QQ.com on September 1, 2010, reads: “Shenzhen Party Secretary Wang Rong: We Hope to Build a Civil Society Even Earlier.”
At the time there were reports in both in the Beijing Youth Daily and Hong Kong’s Ta Kung Pao:
Headlines in China Youth Daily and Hong Kong’s Communist Party-backed Ta Kung Pao in September 2010 report on Shenzhen’s supposed advances on civil society construction. The China Youth Daily headline reads: In Civil Society Construction, Shenzhen Moves to the Forefront.”
Nevertheless, at the very same time that Premier Wen Jiabao’s discussion of political reform was meeting resistance within the Party and political reform became a taboo issue in the media, Shenzhen’s experiments in “civil society” came to an abrupt halt.
At the end of 2010, the top Party leadership in Shenzhen submitted a report to leaders at the provincial level in which they introduced the work they had done in Shenzhen to build civil society. They assumed that their breakthrough work on this front would be welcomed by Wang Yang, the top Party leader in the province, who is one of the chief contenders now for entry into the powerful Politburo Standing Committee. They were reportedly sorely disappointed, however, as the report brought fierce criticism from Wang Yang.
The following is a report from Hong Kong’s Apple Daily on Wang Yang’s response to efforts in Shenzhen. Hong Kong’s Apple Daily reports in late 2010 that Guangdong leader Wang Yang has criticized leaders in Shenzhen for playing politics.
The second line on the Apple Daily headline reads, “Wang Yang Staunchly Criticizes Shenzhen: ‘Don’t Talk Politics.'” Wang Yang’s “politics” reference here points to a deep division within the higher levels of the Party over so-called social construction. Hardliners within the Party have an animosity toward the idea of civil society.
For example, in a May 2011 article published in the Party’s Seeking Truth journal, Zhou Benshun, secretary of the Party’s Central Politics and Law Commission, viciously attacked the idea of social organizations working independent of the government. Zhou said China had to avoid the “pitfall of ‘civil society’ designed for us by certain Western nations.” A Chinese-language report from France’s RFI on May 16, 2012, quotes Zhou Benshun’s remarks that civil society is a Western “pitfall.”
Lately, some people have had two misunderstandings about social management overseas. The first is the idea of ‘small government ‒ large society,’ that the bulk of social management should be taken on by society. In fact, not all developed nations follow this ‘small government ‒ large society’ model, and quite a number of large nations have large governments with the government taking on the principle tasks of social management. Second is the idea that social organizations are a ‘third sector,’ independent of the government and of the social management system. In fact, the vast majority of nongovernmental organizations overseas have government backgrounds, and all are under the effective management of the government. In our country, we must properly regulate conduct in fostering and developing social organizations, first putting ‘safety valves’ in place, thereby preventing the propagation of social organizations with ulterior motives.
In Chinese political lingo, “ulterior motives” are often ascribed to groups or individuals that the Party sees as undermining its leadership, including foreign organizations. Wang’s remarks are in fact quite typical of the xenophobic conservatism generally shown by senior leaders on China’s Politics and Law Commission.
In 2011, the term “civil society” became highly sensitive in China and a number of related bans were issued by the Party’s Central Propaganda Department to the media. In response, more professionally inclined commercial media wanting to explore this general topic used instead the phrase “folk society,” or minjian shehui. Even during this sensitive period, a number of Party officials wrote their own articles dealing with related issues under the umbrella of “social construction.” And even as Wang Yang warned Shenzhen officials against talking about “civil society,” he promoted a number of “social construction” initiatives in Guangdong.
In November 2011, Guangdong announced that it would relax registration rules for so-called mass organizations, generally including associations, federations and charities closely aligned with the government. According to the new rules, taking effect on July 1, 2012, social organizations can now register directly with the Ministry of Civil Affairs ‒ that is, without their application having the sponsorship of a government institution. The rules also paved the way for greater competition by allowing the registration of multiple organizations serving a particular interest or group. Wang Yang said that any activities social organizations could “handle and manage well” would be entrusted to them.
From September to December 2011, the residents of a small village in northeastern Guangdong called Wukan staged a mass rights defense action. Angry over the sale of their land, for which they received no compensation, the villagers ran their local officials out of town and dug in for a long standoff, as they demanded that the government address their concerns. The conflict, now known widely as the “Wukan incident,” resulted in the death of one village-appointed representative, and was only resolved after the intervention of a special “work group” appointed by provincial leaders to negotiate with the villagers. Zhu Mingguo, a deputy secretary of Guangdong province, speaks with villagers from Wukan in December 2011. Photo from Economic Observer Online.
One of the most important signs of compromise on the part of the government during the incident was its recognition of the legitimacy of the provisional committee formed by the villagers to represent their interests. The government had for a time designated the committee as an illegal organization. This was the first instance in China of a popularly elected village organization receiving official recognition. And the handling of the Wukan incident offered a glimpse of Wang Yang’s thinking on the issue of “social construction.”
On November 14, 2011, Wen Jiabao made a speech about proposed further reform of China’s administrative license system. This system, set up in China in the 1950s, basically awards certain organizations power over prescribed activities ‒ such as the operation, for example, of gas stations, or providing telecommunications services. A legacy of the planned economy, the system has slowly been dismantled to allow for greater private participation in certain areas of the economy.
But Wen Jiabao’s speech on the administrative license system also brought in the related issue of social construction:
. . . [We must] further clean up, decrease and adjust the areas subject to administrative license, promoting a transformation of the government’s role. [We must] adhere to the primacy of the market to the principle of social autonomy. In those areas where the market has the ability to make effective adjustments, citizens, legal persons and other organizations can make decisions autonomously, industry associations can [serve as mechanisms for] self-regulation, and the government should not set up administrative licenses . . . There are three priority areas. The first is investment. [We must] continue to deepen investment system reforms, establishing the principal status of enterprises and individuals citizens in investment. The second area is [in the provision of] social programs. [We must] . . . break through monopolies, expand openness, allow fair access and encourage competition. Third is the area of nonadministrative licenses. [We must] clean up cases where agencies and local governments use red tape to restrict [the activities] of citizens, enterprises and other organizations.
[ABOVE: In late November 2011, Guangdong’s Southern Metropolis Daily reports on plans to relax restrictions on the registration of social organizations in the province.]
The Chinese Communist Party has howled the cry of socialism ever since it came to power in 1949. But as Xiong Peiyun, a well-known Chinese writer and academic, has quipped, for many years now China has “had the -ism but not the social.” To put it another way, the Party’s practice of socialism has been radically antisocial, crippling society through decades of political movements in order to serve a powerful state.
The rebuilding of society in China, the nurturing of its social roots, will be an essential part of the long process of political reform in the country.
At we watch the 18th National Congress from the sidelines, “social construction” will be another important watchword to bear in mind. In particular, we can ask the following three sets of questions: 1. How will the political report to the 18th National Congress characterize “social construction,” “social management” and “social system reform”? Will it resort to hard-line views like those of Zhou Benshun, who called civil society a Western “pitfall”? Will it borrow from Wang Yang’s “social construction” playbook (à la Wukan), what is now being called the “Guangdong model“? Will there be traces of Wen Jiabao and his emphasis on autonomous organizations and individuals? 2. Will there be mention of “social self-governance,” or shehui zizhi, which is core to the concept of social construction? The term “self-governing grassroots organizations” appeared 10 years ago in the political report to the 16th National Congress and senior officials have raised a number of related concepts since. In 2004, the People’s Daily ran an article from an academic that advised the leadership to “actively foster nongovernmental organizations and self-governing social organizations.” In a 2005 speech, President Hu Jintao said that “the administrative function of the government and the function of self-governing social organizations should be complementary.” The 2007 political report talked about “expanding the self-governing scope of masses at the grassroots.” Will the political report to the 18th National Congress mention “social self-governance”? And if so, how? 3. The chances are perhaps miniscule, but we must ask: Will we be completely surprised by the appearance in the political report of the term “civil society”?
Nationalist anti-Japanese protests in China reached fever pitch on September 15 and 16, 2012, as Chinese voiced anger over Japanese plans to purchased the disputed Senkaku Islands (which China calls the Diaoyu Islands) from a private Japanese owner. China’s leadership later moved to rein in the protests, which were often strident and sometimes violent. In this cartoon, posted by artist Kuang Biao (邝飚) to Sina Weibo, a nationalist Chinese protester (identified by his red headband), sticks pins into a distinctly Japanese voodoo doll with Japan’s characteristic red sun blooming like a target in the center of its belly.
The following post by Fan Lixiang (范利祥), a commentator for the Nanfang Daily Group Management School, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 9:07 p.m. yesterday, September 25, 2012. The post is a Photoshopped image of U.S. President Barack Obama and China’s presumed next president, Xi Jinping, walking together as Obama leads his dog, which has the face of Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. Fan Lixiang currently has more than 200,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
In the above photo, Obama’s dialogue bubble reads: “Brother Xi, show some mercy. There is a saying that striking a dog falls to its master.” To which Xi Jinping responds, a clear reference to the ongoing row between Japan and China over the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, and to U.S. involvement as Japan’s ally: “Let me warn you: go back home and go to sleep. Otherwise, I’ll strike the dog and his master.”
NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.
By QIAN GANG
Keyword: intraparty democracy (党内民主)
On May 14, 2012, an editorial appeared in China’s official People’s Daily newspaper arguing that the country had made “immense progress” on political reform. At the same time, the editorial resolutely shut the door on the idea of a multiparty political system in China. Even as China “actively and steadily promotes” political reform, it said, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party must be upheld. Moreover:
. . . [We] resolutely will not imitate Western political forms. Only by respecting [our country’s] national circumstances, and by proceeding step-by-step in an orderly way, will we be able to create new Chinese miracles, constantly reaping new self-confidence for our people.
If the idea of competing political parties is left out in the cold, is there any sense in talking about “democracy” at all? Yes, say many Party leaders. And what they advocate are more mechanisms for shared decision-making within the ruling Party itself, what is known as “intraparty democracy,” or dangnei minzhu.
The phrase “intraparty democracy” was in fact a hot watchword in the political report to the 17th National Congress in 2007. But like many Party watchwords, “intraparty democracy” has run hot and cold through history.
At the 9th and 10th national congresses, held during the Cultural Revolution (and the height of power concentration in the hands of Mao Zedong), the phrase disappeared altogether. The phrase appeared three times in the political report to the 11th National Congress in 1977, following the end of the Cultural Revolution, a return to levels actually seen two decades earlier at the 8th National Congress. From the 12th National Congress in 1982 to the 16th National Congress in 2002, the term did appear, but was used only rarely. In these five political reports it emerged 1, 2, 2, 1, and 2 times respectively.
Against this background, the phrase’s showing in the 2007 political report was remarkable. The term popped up five times in a single breathless utterance, as President Hu Jintao said:
. . . [We must] actively advance the building of intraparty democracy, working hard for unity and solidarity within the Party. Intraparty democracy is an important guarantee in strengthening the vitality of the Party, and firming up the Party’s unity and solidarity. [We must] expand intraparty democracy in order to set people’s democracy in motion, furthering harmony within the Party in order to advance harmony in society. [We must] respect the principal status of Party members, ensure the democratic rights of Party members, promote openness of Party affairs, and create the conditions for democratic discussion within the Party. [We must] improve the Party’s national congress system, instituting a system of fixed tenure for delegates to the Party’s national congress, and selecting delegates on a trial basis from a number of counties (cities, districts) for a permanent Party congress system.
Throughout the Party’s history there have been voices calling for an expansion of “democracy” under a single-party system, regarding this as a safe and reliable way of reform. In offering this long grocery list of Party reforms in his political report in 2007, Hu Jintao endeavored to use intraparty democracy as a wedge to promote further reform. But even this is not an easy road.
The above graph plots usage of the term “intraparty democracy” in the People’s Daily since 2003, reflecting fluctuations of the term within central-level Party media.
The second graph above shows the frequency with which the term “intraparty democracy” was used in Chinese news media more generally. The original data were obtained from the Baidu.com news search engine. The two data sets do not entirely match up, but we can see that the peaks and lows do correspond, with rising usage in 2004, 2007 and 2009, and falling usage in 2005, 2008 and 2011.
The rise in 2007 is the most robust, reflecting the more prominent role the term played at the 17th National Congress that year and a general expectation across media that intraparty democracy might make advances. The situation in 2009 is quite different, with a strong showing for the term in the People’s Daily but much weaker use of the term across the media as a whole.
Intraparty democracy basically means shutting the door and promoting democracy inside — it does not entail reforms directly impacting Chinese society at large. But the space within the room, so to speak, is in fact extensive. There are more than 80 million Chinese Communist Party members in China, a Party population roughly equal to the population of Germany. If serious steps were taken to promote “democratic” decision-making within this subpopulation of Chinese, this would greatly advantage China as a whole.
[ABOVE: A door in China, photo by Gill Penney posted to Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.]
The problem is that so far the Chinese Communist Party’s talk on intraparty democracy is just that, talk — at least where the fundamental issues are concerned. Are the conditions there for more “democratic discussion” within the Party? It certainly does not seem so when even China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, is censored by the Central Propaganda Department when he talks about political reform. Are the Party’s affairs handled openly? Ahead of this year’s 18th National Congress, speculation has run rife over possible personnel changes within the Party, and Party members are as much in the dark as anyone else. Nothing at all has been done to experiment with a permanent tenure system for congress delegates, an idea that has come up again and again in talk about intraparty democracy.
The only apparent action is happening at the grassroots level, where there is purportedly experimentation in certain areas with direct election of Party officials. After he took office, Hu Jintao encouraged a number of places in China to organize experiments in the direct election of grassroots Party officials. One of these places was in Jiangsu province, where the provincial Party secretary, Li Yuanchao, first experimented with “open nomination and direct election,” or gongtui zhixuan (公推直选), between 2002 and 2007. Gongtui zhixuan is one method of reforming the mechanisms by which leaders are chosen for official posts, a limited decentralization (or letting go) of the Party’s power to exercise control over its own cadres. The word gongtui, which means roughly “mutual nomination,” refers to the method by which candidates emerge.
Formerly (and of course this is mostly still the case), candidates were simply appointed by their Party superiors. Now, in addition to candidates recommended by superiors, Party members can jointly or individually recommend candidates, and city residents or villagers can send representatives to take part in the nomination process. Zhixuan, which means “direct selection,” refers to a process by which a general meeting of Party members or a congress of Party delegates directly elects a candidate for a post from among the nominees.
At the 17th National Congress in 2007, Li Yuanchao, the Jiangsu leader who had experimented with “open nomination and direct election” at the grassroots level, was himself promoted to the Politburo and made head of the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, the body within the Secretariat that handles personnel decisions. From this position he more actively promoted “open nomination and direct election” as a means of making strides in the development of intraparty democracy.
The Fourth Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee in 2009 said the Party should “promote a method combining open nomination by Party members and the masses and nomination by Party organizations in order to gradually expand the scope of direct election of the leadership groups of grassroots Party organizations.” In 2009 and 2010, China’s media reported actively on these proposed reforms.
By the summer of 2010, “open nomination and direct election” was reportedly being practiced “across the board” in the city of Nanjing, where Li Yuanchao had previously served as Party secretary. This meant, in theory, that all leaders of Party branches in urban neighborhoods and rural villages in this jurisdiction had emerged through this process of open nomination and election. Chinese media called this a “new advance in democracy.”
[ABOVE: A cover of China Newsweek in June 2010 carries the bold headline: “A New Advance in Democracy.”]
“Open nomination and direct election” quickly spread to other regions. In Shenzhen, a deputy provincial level city just across the border from Hong Kong, this method was used even in the selection of delegates to the local Party congress as well as members of the consultative conference, a nominal advisory body made up of representatives from various parties and mass organizations. In a development much touted by the media, Ma Hong, a 42-year-old accountant who had nominated himself as a candidate, was successfully elected as a Party delegate in Shenzhen, becoming the first such case in the country. Ma was dubbed the “black horse,” a play on his surname (“ma” means horse).
[ABOVE: Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily reports on the election of Ma Hong, the “black horse,” as a delegate to the local Party congress in Shenzhen in 2010.]
“Open nomination and direct election” has not yet been formally promoted nationwide in China as the method of handling Party personnel arrangements, one important reason being that it requires amendment of the Party Constitution. But it’s clear from news reports since 2009 that the method has already spread to many places in China.
I wrote in the Hong Kong Economic Times back in 2010: “The 18th National Congress in 2012 is just two years away, and it’s difficult to say whether open nomination and direct election will, in the next two years, be promoted at the level of county Party secretary appointments. However, it is not inconceivable that open nomination and direct election could be practiced to some extent in the selection of provincial Party congress delegates, and even perhaps for national congress delegates.”
The facts over the past two years have shown that I vastly over-estimated the potential for progress on intraparty democracy. So-called intraparty democracy remains confined to the grassroots, to the lowest levels of the Party’s vast bureaucracy, and any progress beyond this has been difficult.
A number of issues related to intraparty democracy are in fact of greater urgency and importance. These include: 1. Checks-and-balances on the powers of decision-making, administration and monitoring (an issue I addressed here). 2.“Fixed tenure” for the national congress.
3. “Differential election” within the Party’s national congress.
The Party notion of “differential election” or cha’e xuanju (差额选举), is a strange concept to grasp, and for readers from democratic countries it may even verge on the ludicrous. But in China, the so-called ”differential ratio,” the ratio of open seats to candidates, is taken seriously as a democratic measure. Essentially, it refers to the ratio of candidates for official posts to the number of posts actually available. In most democratic countries, ideally you would have a ratio of at least 100 percent before you could talk about democracy at all — which is to say, you have at least two candidates for any given position, 100 percent more candidates than positions available.
From the 14th National Congress in 1997 to the 16th National Congress in 2002, the ratio was 10 percent. That means 110 candidates were nominated for every 100 positions. Delegate spots were subject to competition between multiple candidates in at most 10 cases, with delegates to be chosen by Party electors (there could also have been more than 2 candidates for a spot).
At the 17th National Congress in 2007, much was made in official media about the new ratio of 15 percent (115 candidates for every 100 spots). And at this year’s congress the rate is supposed to surpass 15 percent. The highest rate in the Party’s history was set back at the 13th National Congress in 1987, where one out of five delegate positions were contested.
We can also talk about the “differential rate” in selection of candidates for the Party’s Central Committee, the group of around 350 members selected by the national congress, as well as alternative committee members. Here is a chart showing rates for three congresses since the 1980s.
[ABOVE: “Differential rates” for Central Committee members and alternates for three national congresses.]
What will these differential rates look like for the 18th National Congress? More importantly, will differential election be applied at all to the Politburo, that more elite group of 20-odd Party officials who wield the most political power in China? Never in the Party’s history have these elite positions been left to an intra-party elective process.
There is little doubt that we will continue to see the watchword “intraparty democracy” at the 18th National Congress, but the above three issues are critical ones that the 18th National Congress would have to grapple with if any meaningful progress is to be made. We will have to wait and see how the Party deals with them, if at all. At the same time, we should pay attention to whether the 18th National Congress significantly extends the scope of experiments in the reform of grassroots appointments for Party organizations. For example, will “open nomination and direct election” be more formalized as a model and promoted?
By QIAN GANG
Keywords: power of decision-making, power of administration and power of monitoring
If I suggested to my audience that “separation of powers,” the tripartite model of state governance common to many of the world’s democracies, exists in the Chinese Communist Party too, they would probably revile me. “You must be dreaming!” they would scoff, sliding off their shoes to use as projectiles. I’ll leave that thought hanging in mid-air for a moment as I indulge in a bit of background.
In March 2011, at China’s annual National People’s Congress (NPC), Wu Bangguo, the NPC’s chairman and a member of the powerful Politburo Standing Committee, made a statement that later became shortened and popularized as the “Five Will Nots,” or wu bu gao:
China will not do rotational multiparty rule; will not do diversity of guiding ideologies; will not do “separation of powers” and a bicameral system; will not do privatization [of property].
In fact, this idea comes from Deng Xiaoping. In 1987, when Deng had a mind to promote political reform, he stressed that China would not follow a multiparty system and separation of powers, or san quan fen li. When Deng opposed “separation of powers” — in Chinese, literally “separation of three powers” — he was referring broadly to the Western sense of the idea, Montesquieu’s division of political power into the executive, legislative and judiciary.
[ABOVE: Wu Bangguo addresses the NPC in 2011 and rules out Western-style separation of powers.]
It may or may not surprise readers to know that the Chinese Communist Party has its own version of “separation of powers.” This is the idea of a tripartite functioning of power within the Party itself, the three powers being: power of decision-making; power of administration; power of monitoring.
In theory, the highest decision-making organ of the Chinese Communist Party is the National Congress of the CCP. This power is exercised, or administered, by the Central Committee, Politburo and Politburo Standing Committee on which the congress decides. The Central Commission carries out monitoring for Discipline Inspection.
Back in the 1950s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union sought to cleanse itself of the tyranny of Joseph Stalin. At the Chinese Communist Party’s 8th National Congress, held two and a half years after Stalin’s death, it was decided that a permanent body would be constituted to exercise decision-making power while the congress was not in session. At the same time, a secretariat would be formed to execute these decisions. Finally, oversight committees would be set up at various levels to monitor the Party’s work.
It was just a year later, however, that Mao Zedong fomented his Anti-Rightist Movement, re-centralizing and monopolizing these three powers. The tragedies of the Great Chinese Famine and the Cultural Revolution followed over the next two decades. When Deng Xiaoping rose to power after the end of the Cultural Revolution he singled out over-concentration of power as the root sickness of the old political system under Mao. In the Deng Xiaoping era, through the efforts of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, there was some progress in building mechanisms to check power, but that progress was slow.
In today’s Chinese Communist Party the root of decision-making power is somewhat obscure. National congresses are held only once every five years, but these are carefully scripted events, everyone clapping at the right moments, raising their hands to approve matters that have already been decided. After this staged event, the responsibilities of the Party “delegates” are at an end.
[ABOVE: Wen Jiabao addresses the National People’s Congress in 2010, photo by Remko Tanis, available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license. While the NPC is supposed to have substantial lawmaking powers, the real power lies with the Central Committee’s Politburo.]
The Party’s administrative power is massive. Both decision-making power and administrative power are in fact concentrated in the hands of the Central Committee — more precisely, in the hands of the Politburo Standing Committee.
The monitoring of power is a difficult proposition: the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection is controlled by the Central Committee, which means essentially that the sick patient is also the doctor.
The idea of “three powers” within the Chinese Communist Party dates to the era of state-owned enterprise reform in the 1990s. On November 27, 1995, the People’s Daily reported the remarks of the boss of one state-owned enterprise, who said there was a need to create “scientific management systems in which the powers of decision-making, administration and monitoring and their related mechanisms were mutually independent.”
If applied to political power, this idea of “mutually independent mechanisms” is quite significant. Later, however, when the Party introduced the idea of “three powers” into the political sphere, the word “independent” was left out.
Corruption has steadily worsened in China under the leadership of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. In the five years between the 15th National Congress (1997) and the 16th National Congress (2002), the Party investigated at least 98 provincial and ministerial level officials. The first high-level official to be pulled from his perch during Hu Jintao’s term in office was Cheng Weigao, the top leader of Hubei province.
In 2003, as there was increased discussion about “corruption among principles” — meaning officials with chief responsibility for particular offices — the phrase “three powers within the Party” began appearing in the media. But if anyone at the time had tried to elevate the debate by using the phrase “separation of powers within the Party,” or dang nei san quan fen li, they would have been stepping into a forbidden zone.
On November 3, 2004, a brand new weekly publication in Hubei province called the New Weekly Report, or Xin Zhou Bao, ran a gutsy report called, “New Trends in Official Corruption.” The report argued that without the proper monitoring mechanisms, the institutions of power inevitably become hotbeds of corruption. It suggested further that there be “separation of power” within the Party, that the powers of decision-making, administration and monitoring be entrusted to different branches.
[ABOVE: Hubei’s New Weekly Report runs a daring article on separation of power and gets shut down in 2004.]
When this report was re-published by other media, some editors decided to include “separation of powers within the Party” in the headline. The report quickly drew fire from officials in the Central Propaganda Department. Under pressure, provincial officials in Hubei moved immediately to shut down the New Weekly Report, which had published only seven issues. All at once, the phrase “separation of powers within the Party” became taboo.
The phrase “power of decision-making, power of administration and power of monitoring,” however, became more and more popular. The following is a graph of articles on People’s Daily Online using the term “three powers,” or san quan, in recent years:
A meeting of the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection in early 2006 marked an intensification of the official campaign against corruption. Conveying the “spirit” of the meeting, an article in the People’s Daily listed out for the first time the “three powers”:
. . . [The Party] must build and improve power structures for mutual conditioning and mutual coordination of the powers of decision-making, administration and monitoring, improving oversight mechanisms . . .
[ABOVE: A 2006 article in the People’s Daily lists out the “three powers” for the first time in central state media.]
Notice that the report refers to “conditioning” — or restriction — and to “coordination,” but not to “independence.” This phrase was destined to become a formal phrase, a new watchword, making it into the political report to the 17th National Congress in 2007.
[ABOVE: The People’s Daily mentions the “three powers” in an article about the 17th National Congress in 2007.]
The term “three powers” appeared more frequently in the wake of the 17th National Congress. There were two peaks of use, the first in 2008, when the State Council pushed a program of institutional restructuring (and the term “separation of powers” actually appeared in the official Xi’an Daily). The second peak came in 2011, when the fourth full meeting of the Central Committee again appealed for a tough stance on corruption. Clearly, the phrase “three powers” is directly associated with administrative restructuring and anti-corruption.
[ABOVE: The official Xi’an Daily uses the term “separation of powers” in a headline dealing with the “three powers.”]
As the 18th National Congress approaches, some language in the official press has linked the “three powers” of the Chinese Communist Party with political reform. People’s Forum, a magazine supplement of the People’s Daily, ran an article in its July 2012 edition by Xu Yaotong, a professor at the China National School of Administration. Professor Xu wrote: “In its top-level design, political reforms must take reasonable steps to separate the power structure into separate institutional structures [exercising] the ‘power of decision-making, power of administration and power of monitoring,’ so that these ‘three powers’ can operate on their own and mutually check [one another].'” This idea of three powers that are “separate” and “operating on their own” was a step closer to the idea of independently operating powers or branches.
There have also been increasingly bold calls for reform of the Party power structure from Party insiders. Unpublishable in China’s mainstream media, these have been passed along privately, through e-mail and social media. One of the most notable examples has come from Cao Siyuan, a well-known constitutional scholar in China. In a piece called, “Three Suggestions for the 18th National Congress,” Cao argued that the most serious issue for the Party was the concentration of the powers of decision-making and monitoring in the hands of those also charged with implementing policies. He offered a proposal for the separation and mutual balancing of powers within the Party.
According to Cao’s proposal, the number of delegates to the National Congress, which exercises decision-making power, should be trimmed down. This smaller, more streamlined body would then serve a permanent role for the five-year duration of each congress. Delegates to national congresses, now numbering more than 2,000, would be reduced to around 500 permanently serving members who would be salaried and meet on an annual basis. This body would have the power to elect or remove officials in administrative and monitoring organs, but they would not have the power to interfere in these activities.
The delegates in Cao’s proposal would elect from among themselves seven to nine committee members to form an Executive Commission (like the present Standing Committee) to serve an executive function. The Executive Commission would report on and be responsible for the work of the National Congress, offering opposing opinions and prompting reconsideration of policy decisions.
[ABOVE: Flowers outside the Communist Party Museum are formed in the shape of the Party’s flag. Photo by z_fishies available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.]
The National Congress would also, under Cao’s plan, select five to seven members to form a Discipline Inspection Commission to exercise a monitoring role. The primary responsibility of this commission would be to monitor the conduct of Party officials of approximate rank (including delegates to the National Congress and members of the Executive Commission). They could not, however, interfere in the daily business of the congress or other officials.
Importantly, officials serving as delegates to the National Congress, or as members of the Executive Commission Discipline Inspection Commission, would not be permitted to hold other positions concurrently.
Cao believes that his plan could ensure that decision-making power in its present form could be made substantial instead of empty, and at the same time elevate the power of monitoring to an independent status, so that the three institutions provide separate checks — and so that the executive institution, the most easily abused, can be effectively monitored.
This is one form of intra-Party reform as proposed by a moderate within the Party. Nevertheless, for many within the Party, this proposal is revolutionary if not outright subversive.
If separation of powers occurred within the Party, this would effectively mean victory over the existing, entrenched system of concentration of power within the executive. That is something that won’t happen at the upcoming 18th National Congress. Nevertheless, the watchword “three powers” is one to watch carefully at the 18th National Congress. Will the phrase that was included in the political report five years ago make it into the upcoming political report? If it does, will the phrasing change in any way, and how? Will the idea of three powers edge closer to the idea – and perhaps even the likelihood – of their independent exercise? Is there any possibility for the implementation of a permanent body of delegates such as that envisioned by Professor Cao? And if this does not become an agenda for the moment, will there be any mention of a timetable for such reform?
By QIAN GANG
Keyword: power is given by the people
President Hu Jintao had scarcely settled into office in 2002 when he introduced his own signature watchword to the Party vocabulary. On December 5, 2002, just three weeks after the close of the 16th National Congress, Hu Jintao declared during a visit to Xibaipo, a village with symbolic importance as a Chinese Communist Party base in the late 1940s:
“Leading cadres at all levels must continue to work at the grassroots level, going among the masses, listening to the call of the masses, tending to the hardships of the masses, exercising power for the people, empathizing with the feelings of the people, and working for the well-being of the people.”
This utterance was quickly seized upon by Hong Kong media, which summed it up as the “new three principles of the people,” or xin san min zhuyi, a reference to the political philosophy of Sun Yat-sen, dating to the late 19th century.
In June 2003, the full-length Hu Jintao phrase was written into a policy document calling for renewed study of the political theories of Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin. Four years later, the new three principles — the longhand form, that is, and not the “new three principles” catchphrase originated in Hong Kong — were included in Hu Jintao’s political report to the 17th National Congress.
On September 1, 2010, Xi Jinping, assumed to be Hu Jintao’s successor ever since he was promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee at the 17th National Congress, called on Party members in a speech at the Central Party School to have a “correct view of the world, of power and of their work.” He said:
. . . The Marxist view of power can be summed up in two phrases: power is given by the people, and power is used for the people.
[ABOVE: The headline on this Xinhua News Agency piece posted to QQ.com reads: “Xi Jinping Describes His View of Power at the Central Party School: Power is Given By the People.”]
We should note the timing of Xi Jinping’s remarks, which come right in the midst of Premier Wen Jiabao’s burst of statements in 2010 about political reform. Prior to Xi Jinping’s speech, Wen had already made two important speeches on political reform, and he would subsequently discuss political reform on five other occasions through October 2010.
Xi Jinping’s use of the phrase “power is given by the people,” or quan wei min suo fu, is a conspicuous reference to Hu Jintao’s so-called “new three principles of the people.” What’s more, Xi’s statement builds on Hu’s formula by dealing with the question of the origin of power. Guangdong’s Southern Weekly, one of China’s more outspoken newspapers, seized on this Xi Jinping moment as one of the current affairs bright spots of 2010 in China.
[ABOVE: An online article at Southern Weekly defines Xi Jinping’s remarks on the origin and meaning of power at a “bright spot” of 2010.]
Across the border in Hong Kong, commentators were more openly sanguine, certain that this comment from Xi Jinping signaled that the Party’s fifth generation of leaders would jump-start political reform.
[ABOVE: A blog in Hong Kong argues in September 2010 that Xi Jinping’s remarks on the origin of power signal that the “fifth generation” of Party leaders will jumpstart political reforms.]
Xi Jinping’s speech was reported by both the People’s Daily and People’s Daily Online:
[ABOVE: The Party’s official People’s Daily runs a front-page report on Xi Jinping’s speech at the Central Party School.]
But the phrase “power is given by the people” is not yet a mature watchword in the Party media. The phrase has never appeared in a headline at the People’s Daily — a coming of age ritual for any Party phrase — and it has appeared in just 11 articles in the People’s Daily in the past two years (to July 2012).
President Hu Jintao’s exact attitude toward this phrase is a matter of speculation. In June 2003, Zhu Houze, a known reform advocate who once served as head of the Party’s Central Propaganda Department, openly elaborated on the “new three principles of the people” at a Party meeting, saying:
Party leaders have demanded that cadres at various levels ‘exercise power for the people, empathize with the feelings of the people, and work for the well-being of the people’ . . . What are we supposed to rely on to make this happen? Is it a matter of consciousness, or of conscience? I think the crux still lies in ‘endowment of power by the people’. This, still, is the system’s most fundamental security.
The phrase used by Zhu Houze, quan wei min suo shou, is identical in meaning to quan wei min suo fu, the phrase Xi Jinping used in 2010. It is rumored, however, that Hu Jintao was displeased with Zhu Houze’s outburst, which went beyond the Party’s responsibilities, to the very root of its legitimacy.
Neither Hu Jintao nor Jiang Zemin have ever uttered language of this kind — raising so directly, in the roundabout world of the watchword, the issue of legitimacy of power. For Xi Jinping to make such a remark about power being “given” by the people was something remarkable.
What had Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao said? In his report to the 15th National Congress, Jiang Zemin said: “Our power is vested in us by the people, every cadre is a public servant of the people, and they must be monitored by the people and by the law.” The difference, which might seem trifling rendered into English, is in fact politically significant.
Jiang repeated the language in his report to the 16th Party Congress five years later, saying: “[We must] ensure that the power vested by the people is used to seek the interests of the people.” And Hu Jintao’s phrasing in his report to the 17th National Congress, parroted Jiang Zemin: “[We must] ensure that the power vested by the people is used, from start to finish, to seek the interests of the people.”
These three instances are in fact far weaker than the idea of power being given by the people as a supplement to the so-called “new three principles of the people,” which spell out the spirit in which power must be exercised and sidestep the legitimacy issue.
While President Hu has not invoked the phrase “power is given by the people,” he has on a number of occasions addressed the issue of the Party’s “ruling status,” or zhizheng diwei. Released by the central Party leadership in 2004, the breathlessly named “Decision on the Strengthening of the Chinese Communist Party’s Ruling Ability” said that “the Party’s ruling status is not a birthright, nor is it permanent.”
In 2008, a lead editorial in the People’s Daily quoted Hu Jintao as saying: “The Party’s core ruling status is not permanent, possession in the past does not equate to possession in the present, and possession in the present does not equate to possession in the future.” In his speech to commemorate the Party’s 90th birthday in 2011, he again emphasized: “Leading cadres at various levels must bear in mind that the power in our hands was vested by the people.”
The appearance of “power is given by the people” in the political report to the 18th National Congress is virtually assured. But will this phrase be repeated and emphasized? This question, which will ultimately be decided by internal power plays, is a matter of wordplay that directly concerns China’s political future.
